…For Teaching ELL, ESL, & EFL

The Best Resources For Learning The Advantages To Being Bilingual Or Multilingual

I’m preparing a series of lessons for my Intermediate English students highlighting the advantages to being bilingual (I’ll share them here once they’re done). I think they’ll provide some good positive reinforcement. I thought readers might find it useful to see the few resources I’ve identified, and hope you can suggest others.

In a related issue,e very so often I’ll have a student who says they’re not very interested in learning English because they’re going back to Mexico as soon as possible. My usual response, which has been pretty effective, is that the student is likely to get a better-paying job there if he/she knows English, too. That position makes sense to me and, usually, to the student, who then tends to become more serious about learning English. I have gotten anecdotal evidence from English teachers in Mexico that this statement is true, but had never been able to find any concrete evidence to back it up.

Another study of bilingual people carried out by Judith Kroll, a psychologist at Penn State University, supported the idea that speaking more than one language keeps the brain in shape and bolsters mental function. She found that bilingual speakers could outperform single-language speakers in mental tasks such as editing out irrelevant information and focusing on important details. Bilinguals were also better at prioritising and multi-tasking, she said.

“We would probably refer to most of these cognitive advantages as multi-tasking,” said Kroll. “Bilinguals seem to be better at this type of perspective-taking.”

Healthy individuals who immigrate to the U.S. often see their health decline over time. A recent study from Stanford University suggests that immigrants who learn English while maintaining their native language might be protected against this puzzling phenomenon.

Ariela Schachter, a Ph.D. student in sociology, examined the correlation between English and native-language proficiency and Asian and Latino immigrants’ self-reported health status. The results, published in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, showed that people who are proficient at both English and their native language report better health than do speakers of just one language.

Learning a new language can grow one’s perspective. Now scientists find that learning languages grows parts of the brain.

Scientists studied the brains of students in the Swedish Armed Forces Interpreter Academy, who are required to learn new languages at an alarmingly fast rate. Many must become fluent in Arabic, Russian and the Persian dialect Dari in just 13 months. The researchers compared the brains of these students to the brains of medical students who also have to learn a tremendous amount in a very short period of time, but without the focus on languages.

The brains of the language learners exhibited significant new growth in the hippocampus and in parts of the cerebral cortex. The medical students’ brains showed no observed growth.

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8 Comments

Hi Larry – I wanted to reach out on behalf of the entire Voxy team and say thanks for including our “Why It Pays To Be Bilingual” infographic on this list! Glad to hear that you’re talking to your students about the advantages of bilingualism, too. There are indeed quite a few.

Hello Larry,
a penfriend of mine who teaches German at a university in Jekaterinenburg, Russia, has lately asked me to write her a paper about the importance of the knowledge of a second language.
I’ve also involved my students with this task. We’ve without any doubt come to the conlcusion that for us here in Switzerland the knowledge of languages represent the equivalent of natural resources; without them we are lost! How to you want to get a job in the IT sector, tourism, in a bank or in an international company without any English?
Of course, learning and practising a language keeps our brains also active but above this, it makes contact with people form other cultures and countries easier and it certainly helps to understand them better.
I hope that it is true what is said about Alzheimer and dementia because I’ve read these days that the origin of Alhzeimer may be in the liver and not in the brain!
All the best Martina

Being bilingual gives you some kind of freedom. Sometimes you may feel like talking to no one, but by means of your mother tongue you probably throw out your very first thoughts and all of a sudden you are relieved. It’s difficult to explain, but it’s good to be bilingual and it helps a lot.
Thanks a lot for everything.
Ana

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